Good morning.

Welcome to the special meeting of the Board of Clark County Commissioners for Monday, May 18th.

We'll begin the public forum today with the first public comment period.

Anyone wishing to speak, please come forward at this time.

You may speak for up to three minutes.

State your name for the record.

Seeing no one, I'll close the public hearing and we'll move on to the agenda.

The second item on the agenda is the approval of the agenda.

Is there a motion for approval?

We'll approve of the agenda.

There's a motion for approval, please cast your vote.

Turn it over to Manager Schiller for the public hearing items.

Commissioners, your next item is conduct a public hearing on the fiscal year two thousand twenty-seven tentative budget for Clark County.

Um in addition to that, before I get started, I wanted to take a minute to thank um Jennifer Green to my left, our director and Chris Wardlaw, our manager over budget and finance, as well as the entire team.

Also included, you'll see that Metro only requested 30 positions for a total of three million dollars.

Um so what's not included today is an actual approval of supplemental positions, but we did include our recommendations in the final budget that we're proposing.

We also looked at department vacancies to see if they were if there were vacancies that had been vacant for a number of months or maybe even years and try to repurpose those vacancies as well.

We also looked for cost offsets.

So a good example is if we're contracting for services and the departments asking to add positions, you have a cost offset where you're not going to have the contracted service anymore.

And so here is a summary of what our recommendations are.

We'll bring those back to you at the next board meeting in June for your consideration.

But this is what's included in your budget today.

And so the county general fund, non-general fund, Clark County Detention Center, and then including Metro for a total of $7.1 million.

But for just general fund, the general fund impact is only close to $5.5 million because that's going to include your general fund, detention center, and metro request.

And this is just revenue, your revenues comparison.

And so we didn't make any updates to your general fund revenues.

Just as a follow-up, I wanted to make sure that you knew that we have been monitoring consolidated tax revenue.

It's difficult to monitor because remember, last year they had changed the timing.

So when you look at a month over month, it looks higher than it really is because they shortened the time period last year and now they've gone back to the historical way of cutting off the distributions.

And so that being said, we smoothed out fiscal year 25 compared to fiscal year 2026, and it looks like C tax revenue is trending at about two to two and a half percent increase, which is better than decreasing.

It's just not still not keeping up with the increase in expenditures.

This next slide is comparing again what we filed on April 15th as far as expenditures compared to what we're proposing in fiscal year 27 for the final budget.

And so these small increases are largely due to the supplemental positions that we're recommending.

Again, this just ensures we have budgetary budgetary authority with Department of Taxation, but we'll bring those positions back to you in June to authorize the actual creation of the positions.

One thing that may look strange is when you look at other general expense at increase four million dollars.

This is really just an accounting standard issue where we used to record $4 million as a transfer to an internal service fund that now needs to be recorded as a charge for service.

And so the transfers out the net 0.2 is the difference between the metro and detention transfer and then this reclass of the $4 million to other.

So from what you saw really immaterial difference, only $5.5 million.

Again, we were trying we're trying to contain the growth of expenditures and the general fund as much as possible.

Again, generate as much savings as we can to roll into the next year until revenues catch up to the growth and expenditures.

Um that we've presented to you today.

And so an overall increase of 4.2%.

In our last hearing, we had property tax revenue.

When we got the fine received the final numbers from Department of Taxation, those numbers actually came in lower than what we had originally projected.

So we filed the final tentative budget on April 15th rather than a 7% increase in property taxes.

It was only 5.2.

Again, the same as the same for C tax revenue, like I said, it kind of really just washed because we looked at Department of Taxation's final numbers for C tax revenue, and they were also a little higher than we originally estimated.

Like I said, we are trending when we smooth out FY25 at 2.5% rather than the 0.5% we were thinking.

And my last follow-up in this area is licenses and permits.

Remember, there was a lot of concern on what is happening with the number of permits.

So a large portion when you look dollar-wise, the decrease is largely due to franchise fee revenue, and that's in gas and electricity.

And so we'll continue to monitor that throughout FY27.

It can be volatile, obviously, but right now we're conservatively budgeting for that trend to continue into FY27.

The actual number of permits that we presented to you, it was alarming that the number of permits had decreased so much, and that is largely due to a decrease in the TNC driver permits.

So your Ubers and Lyfts, they don't have the same material impact dollar wise because those permits are relatively immaterial.

There's just a large number of them.

But again, we do have plan to come back to you with an update on revenues as well as those other economic indicators that we've been presenting.

So overall, a 4.2% increase in revenue is what we're estimating.

And our expenditures, tentative budget compared to final budget.

Again, we're budgeting our contractual obligations in addition to that 5.5 million in the additional supplemental positions for a total increase of 5.6%.